Watch previous episodes of ON THE COUCH & ON THE GO by clicking here! Visit our Vimeo and YouTube playlists, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!
Apologies for the delay in posting more episodes of ON THE COUCH until now, we had some technical problems with some of the recordings, but they are now sorted out. We pushed the less time critical episodes to the end, and there a few exciting ones coming over the next week or so.
On this 10th episode of ON THE COUCH, I talked to Tabb Firchau from Freefly Systems about new things in the world of their famous brushless gimbals. It’s been one year since the fuminant debut of the MōVI M10 with Vincent Laforet’s spectacular launch film, which propelled handheld gimbals into the filmmaking world stratosphere – ever since then, they have infiltrated an incountable number of productions around the world.
The big success of the MōVI introduction spurred a seemingly endless flurry of copycat systems from countless small and big manufacturers, with mixed results. I asked Tabb about this and what he thinks about the long-term success prospects of some of these companies. Tabb talked about Freefly’s new products – the now-shipping little brother of the M10, the M5, which is made for DSLR-sized cameras, the upcoming M15, the larger version for bigger cameras (such as the Alexa M), as well as innovation around their gimbals which makes them more versatile – for example a ring around the MōVI which makes hand-overs easier, or their plans to release a wheeled dolly-type version of the MōVI.
MōVI M5 for smaller cameras like DSLRs started shipping at NAB
We also had a chat about Freefly’s history and how they actually got to make make these gimbals in the first place. Freefly Systems’ sister film production company Freefly Cinema used to be their core business as they are all shooters who were looking to ways to move the camera – that’s when they founded Freefly Systems and they realized within 6 months that it had become a much bigger business than the production business.
Watch the episode above to learn more about where Freefly came from, where they are now and where they might be headed!
Next episode coming early next week … stay tuned to cinema5D.com.
For all ON THE COUCH episodes so far, click here:

Watch previous episodes of ON THE COUCH & ON THE GO by clicking here! Visit our Vimeo and YouTube playlists, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!
In the 9th episode of our talk show ON THE COUCH, we had the pleasure of talking to Neil Anderson, Sales Manager of our show sponsor Tools On Air, an Austrian company providing professional, yet easy to use software solutions for broadcast. Tools On Air provided us with their application Live Cut for the show recording – a piece of software that allowed our editor Katharina Dietl to cut between the 3 cameras in realtime, while running all three 1080p streams into the Mac Pro simultaneously, and generating an EDL with Live Cut. The EDL could then easily be exported as a multicam clip for Final Cut Pro X, 7 or Premiere Pro – which allowed us to change edits afterwards freely, before finishing and uploading each show. A very convenient and efficient solution to deal with multicam recordings, without which we would have been unable to deliver shows without starting from scratch with an edit after the recording wrapped.
(Big thanks also to Oliver Deutsch from Tools On Air, who was invaluable support on site, helping us set up the Live Cut system and maintain it properly.)
Tools On Air’s Neil Anderson

There are so many product releases at NAB, it’s hard to keep up. Certainly the smaller products, these get dwarfed by exciting new camera releases and it can often take months for the dust to settle and the new smaller releases creep back out of the wood work.
Whilst shooting episode 5 of our On The Couch show, Vitec Videocom introduced a product that I considered fantastic, a true time saver and genius design. The Sachtler Speedlevel Clamp is design to work with 100mm bowl tripod heads; it replaces the standard screw lock found on your head.
It provides instant adjustment, simple squeeze the arms together and the clamp loosens off allowing quick levelling of the tripod head.
I can’t wait to see more of these products surface and offer support for all size tripod bowls. Currently Sachtler only offer the Speedlevel for 100mm tripods, but I have asked the question about 75mm and 50mm bowl support.
The Sachtler Speedlevel clamp is available for order now.

Watch previous episodes of ON THE COUCH & ON THE GO by clicking here! Visit our Vimeo and YouTube playlists, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!
In a new episode of our talk format ON THE COUCH, Greg Crosby from G-Technology gives us a run-down of their new storage products targeted specifically to the increasing storage needs of professional filmmakers and creatives.
Their new Studio series was designed with the new Mac Pro in mind, both in looks and functionality: it supports Thunderbolt 2, uses server-grade 7200 3.5″ HDDs in a 2-bay (G-Raid Studio) and a 4-bay (G-Speed Studio) version with up to a whopping 24TB. The G-Raid Studio supports RAID-0, RAID-1 and JBOD, while the G-Speed Studio is a hardware RAID that supports RAID-0, -1, -5, -6 and -10 configurations. The Helium technology allows individual hard drives to store up to an amazing 6TB now.

Watch previous episodes of ON THE COUCH & ON THE GO by clicking here! Visit our Vimeo and YouTube playlists, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!
Our lead sponsor for ON THE COUCH is B&H – a camera and accessories retailer everyone knows, in fact the largest in the United States. In this special episode, I talked to Gabriel Biderman from the marketing department of B&H, to hear about his impressions from this year’s NAB and the big trends that they notice (and which they have a lot more insight in as they know what sells best). Be it 4K, octocopter drones or camera movement – Gabriel knows exactly what their customers like.

Canon didn’t release any new large sensor cameras at this NAB. Some people are unhappy, others rejoice that Canon takes their time to craft something relevant instead of throwing a spec sheet at us like many manufacturers seem to be in the habit of doing nowadays.
While Canon stays silent on the camera side, they did present a very noteworthy piece of glass at NAB 2014. Their new Cine-Servo Zoom is one of a kind.

Watch previous episodes of ON THE COUCH & ON THE GO by clicking here! Visit our Vimeo and YouTube playlists, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!
This is a very special (sixth) 50 minute episode of ON THE COUCH, in which we had the pleasure of hosting my friend Rodney Charters, ASC, best known for his work as director of photography on “24”, “Shameless” and now the new “Dallas”, Bruce Logan, ASC, best known for his work on the original TRON, the original Star Wars films and Batman Forever, as well as the owners of Zacuto, Steve Weiss and Jens Bogehegn – both of them shooters with decades-long experience in production themselves!